But I don't see the value of government intervention.
You don't see the value of THE PEOPLE stepping in when a PUBLIC company is corrupt?
Your anti-government ideology is getting in the way of your practical thinking. OBVIOUSLY your "keep the government out of this" ideology has failed. Even now with all the corporate coruption in the news we see this story of a Board voting itself "loans" that they don't have to repay. Of course this should be illegal.
Simply put, BeOS was an excellent operating system, but OBOS may (or may not) fall under some of the axes that fell on BeOS.
The MAIN thing that killed BeOS was Microsoft actively blocked computer manufacturers from putting it on their computers. If it had been shipped with computers you can be sure that plenty of developers would have been developing apps, and Microsoft knew that.
Even the Bush anti-trust settlement forbids Microsoft from stopping manufacturers, so OBOS would have a shot at getting on computers. BeOS was much more user friendly than Linux, so this is a possibility.
Lindows isn't about users at home buying and installing it themselves.
If you make computers Lindows isn't $99, it's a single $500 fee for as many computers as you want to put it on. So if you build 50,000 computers that is one penny per computer. Windows is the largest single component cost of a Wintel computer.
Shockingly enough, I don't see that function enumerated ANYWHERE in the Constitution. I, of course, must be in error. Please, by all means, educate me as to where you found it stated that one of the government's roles is to "protect" us from corporations?
What do you think a corporation IS?! It is an invention of government (the people) that is supposed to benefit us (the people). We, the people, through our government, allow people to organize a business in a certain way TO SERVE THE COMMUNITY INTEREST.
What Republicans/corporatists are missing when they complain about "the government" is that the government is the PEOPLE. And there is red tape, because there has to be ACCOUNTABILITY. The red tape is OVERSIGHT. Corporations don't have accountability internally, they are autocratic and are not easily accountable to the people. SO they have to be REGULATED so they don't get out of control.
So there's still a chance of the OS and productivity software markets opening up to competition, instead of the Bush "settlement" (read: bribe payoff) which gives government protection to the Microsoft monopoly!
The idea of the antitrust suit was to enable competition. Here's a test of the result of the Bush "settlement" - has there been increased investment in companies competing with Microsoft in the OS and productivity software arenas?
As for your high taxes, I agree; but I don't think it has anything to do with the Cold War. It has more to do with Congress, and their pet projects.
Dude, you're using a computer. How hard do you think it will be for you to look some of this up? There's a place called Google and it's at www.google.com. It takes keywords, like "US budget".
As for Congress and their projects, this is a MINISCULE part of where the tax money goes. It goes primarily to military, interest on the Reagan debt, and programs that benefit individuals like Medicare & food stamps. (Social Security comes from a trust fund that is built up from the FICA tax, so count that separately. It has a HUGE surplus - even though the government is currently using that trust fund to pay for recent tax cuts.) LOOK IT UP.
After the cold war military spending went UP. We now spend more than EVERY OTHER COUNTRY PUT TOGETHER and we're using that money on jet planes to chase people riding horses in the desert.
A flat tax would be the best. No corporate welfare, no deductions for my kids, my mortgage, my stock market losses, etc. Everybody (and I mean everybody) pays the same. We might be surprised at how well that works out.
A flat tax would mean that everyone really rich pays a lot less and everyone else pays a lot more. That's what "flat" means. Are you SURE that's a really good idea? YOUR taxes would way more than double, guaranteed, unless you're one of the top 2% or so.
No deductions huh? Suppose you own a store, you buy $90,000 worth of stuff and sell it for $100,000. You'll have to pay taxes on $100,000 income because there are no deductions for the stuff you bought to resell. And if you say deduct THAT, then we're right back where we started, arguing over WHAT is deductable.
I don't understand why some apparently left-leaning people think stockholders should be on the hook for corporate expenses and liabilities.
You don't understand why the OWNERS of a company shouldn't be responsible for its DEBTS???
What about when Drexel Burnham borrowed $100 million, gave it out in bonuses to their top execs, then declared bankruptcy 90 days later? That is an extreme example to illustrate the case, and it did happen.
It's well documented that the Reagan SDI was the world's biggest head-fake for the kremlin-- it was meant to accelerate Soviet spending to the point that it would break the regime, and it worked!
It's also documented that Soviet spending on arms did not increase AT ALL after Reagan's election.
It's not hard to look up. Don't just repeat what Rush says.
In the U.S. corporations and their shareholders are not ultimately responsible for their debt. When a company goes bankrupt the shareholders do not have to pay off the creditors. The public has to absorb the debt.
And the public ha to absorb the costs of pollution created by the companies, health costs, etc.
Have you factored in the costs of roads, highway patrols, wrecks, ambulances, and the whole taxpayer-funded infrastructure that props up the federal highway system?
And fuel use, carbon emmissions, other emmissions, oil dropped on the roads and finding its way into streams, rivers, lakes and the ocean, brake dust finding its way into lungs, and insurance?
Time to face reality, even if they had recounted a thousand more times, Bush still would have won. Even the liberal newspapers who did their own recount came to the same conclusion.
This is just FALSE! The newspaper conclusion depended on which way they were counted, and whether the illegal military absentee votes, sent AFTER the eletion, were counted.
There is no question that tens of thousands more Floridians TRIED to vote for Gore, and that Gore got more than 500,000 more votes that Bush nationwide.
This is not offtopic, it's a historical perspective on this subject, from the U.S. viewpoint. Many Slashdot readers are too young to remember Nixon, so here's a reminder of why so many Americans worry about giving government police and spy agencies too much unregulated power.
After Nixon's resignation, the Church Committee, named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, conducted a wide-ranging investigation of US intelligence agencies. In its final report, issued in April 1976, the committee concluded: "Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied."
The committee said the abuses by the intelligence apparatus mirrored the growth of excessive executive power and excessive secrecy, and that in the name of "national security" intelligence officers and their senior officials blatantly disregarded the law and the civil liberties of their targets. (Sound familiar, anyone?)
The Church Committee revealed the enormous scope of the operations against anti-war demonstrators, civil rights activists and left-wing political parties. This included the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro), which had the stated goal "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" left-wing opponents of government policy. FBI headquarters alone developed over 500,000 domestic intelligence files on US citizens.
In addition the committee found:
* At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency."
* Nearly a quarter of a million first class letters were opened and photographed in the US by the CIA between 1953 and 1973, producing a CIA computerized index of nearly 1.5 million names.
* Separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups in the course of the CIA's Operation CHAOS (1967-1973), aimed at crushing the student anti-war movement.
* Millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the US were obtained by the National Security Agency from 1947 to 1975 under a secret arrangement with three US telegraph companies. (Replaced now by Eschalon)
* An estimated 100,000 Americans were the subjects of United States Army intelligence files created between the mid-1960s and 1971.
* Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were created by the Internal Revenue Service between 1969 and 1973 and tax investigations were started on the basis of political rather than tax criteria.
The Senate committee also found that these agencies sent anonymous letters attacking the political beliefs of targets in order to induce their employers to fire them. Similar letters were sent to spouses in an effort to destroy marriages. The committee also documented criminal break-ins, the theft of membership lists and misinformation campaigns aimed at provoking violent attacks against targeted individuals.
One of the most infamous operations uncovered by the Church Committee was the FBI's campaign to "neutralize" civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. This included an extensive surveillance program to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" to use in order to "completely discredit" them. The FBI mailed King a tape recording made from microphones hidden in hotel rooms. As one agent testified, this was an attempt to destroy King's marriage. The tape was accompanied by a note suggesting that the recording would be released to the public unless King committed suicide.
The FBI's Cointelpro operations against the Black Panthers involved the killing of several leaders, including Fred Hampton, by the Chicago police, as well as the frame-up and imprisonment of scores of others.
You say raising the minimum wage helps the economy because it gives workers more spending money. Okay, fine. But honestly, please, honestly, what do you think the employers are going to do about the prices of products they sell? Maybe raise them to make up for the loss in profit caused by paying more for workers?
Employers hire as many workers as they need to to meet demand.
They don't hire workers because they have extra cash laying arouynd, and they don't fire workers when customers are pounding on the door.
Companies price their goods at a level competitive with their competitors, and according to what customers will pay. Labor, especially at the minuimum wage level, is SUCH a small part of the pricing... (I ran a company for 15 years.)
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Regardless of who's statistics you look at, the truth is irrefutable: Social Security DEPENDS on the concept of todays worker's paying for today's retirees.
Actually you don't seem to know much about it. It is NOT financed by current taxpayers. It is financed by the money we set aside - OUR money pays for our RETIREMENT. Social Security has a multi-trillion dollar surplus built up.
Under Reagan, (after he cut taxes for the rich and there were huge deficits resulting) they pasSed a huge Social Security tax increase (which made the deficits look lower). Since then this surplus has been building up. Since then it is OUR money being set aside for our own retirement. (Which is why it is so bad that Bush is spending that money on tax cuts for the rich.)
If you prefer some unarguable figures, go to www.omb.gov and note that the "largest peacetime economic expansion in history" did not begin under Clinton, or even Bush #1...it began under Reagan! In his second term, not his first! You cannot argue these figures, they are true!
If you stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh and did your own research you would know that there was a big recession in 1991. That eneded the Reagan expansion (which started after the Deficit Reduction Act tax increases in 1984 by the way.)
$125,000 a year isn't even NEAR what we're talking about here. You aren't even getting the tax cuts, dude. You're paying INTO Social Security and that money is being used to GIVE the tax cuts to those WAY above your pay grade..
I understand. Everything GOOD with the economy came from Reagan and now Bush. Everything BAD with the economy came from Clinton.
Got it. Understood. Wakarimashita.
Also, looking over historical charts that show the stock market ALWAYS doing much better under Democrats - that's ALWAYS from the preceeding Republican presidents.
And looking over the historical charts, showing that Democrats ALWAYS lower deficits or balance budgets, that's ALWAYS because of the preceeding Republican presidents - and Republicans ALWAYS increase deficits and debt, that's because of the preceeding Democrats.
But couldn't you also say that taxing corporations and rich people more would cause them to hire fewer employees and pay lower salaries to them?
This isn't an abstract argument. This is easy to check. Look at what happens when the minimum wage is raised, or when taxes are raised.
This is what Clinton did in 1993. Look what happened - the best economy ever. AND look back in history to whenever this has been done before - very high economic growth results.
Under Bush taxes have been cut and government services are being cut - and the minimum wage has slipped way down (due to cost of living increases without increasing the minimum.)
Furthure, you could also say that taxing corporations less would give them more money to pay employers or expand business.
OK, this is also easy to check. So is that what HAPPENS? Guess what, it isn't. Corporations have much higher growth when there is MORE regulation. Look it up. Not hard to do.
What the hell did the "community" ever do for people like us?
No matter what you might think of democracy, community, charity, etc. you have to admit that spending public money to control epidemics saves YOUR ass as well as everyone else.
We ARE all in the same boat whether you like it or not.
The first community in the U.S., Jamestown, forced the rich to work because everyone had to eat, everyone needed shelter, and everyone had to pitch in.
If I recall correctly, W's big tax cut reduced the maximum federal income tax rate from 39.6% to 33% or so, which means someone making $50,000 a year will see a small gain, but those that are incredibly wealthly, making $1 Million a year, will see a huge windfall.
Sorry, but ONLY the very very rich get that tax cut. If you're making $50K you aren't in the bracket that got cut.
Slashdot Mirror
You can get the 14-day demo of gobeProductive here. (Windows version.)
But I don't see the value of government intervention.
You don't see the value of THE PEOPLE stepping in when a PUBLIC company is corrupt?
Your anti-government ideology is getting in the way of your practical thinking. OBVIOUSLY your "keep the government out of this" ideology has failed. Even now with all the corporate coruption in the news we see this story of a Board voting itself "loans" that they don't have to repay. Of course this should be illegal.
going against the personal incentives that drive capitalism in the first place
Stealing from shareholders is the personal incentive that drives capitalism? NO WONDER our 401Ks are gone!
Simply put, BeOS was an excellent operating system, but OBOS may (or may not) fall under some of the axes that fell on BeOS.
The MAIN thing that killed BeOS was Microsoft actively blocked computer manufacturers from putting it on their computers. If it had been shipped with computers you can be sure that plenty of developers would have been developing apps, and Microsoft knew that.
Even the Bush anti-trust settlement forbids Microsoft from stopping manufacturers, so OBOS would have a shot at getting on computers. BeOS was much more user friendly than Linux, so this is a possibility.
Lindows isn't about users at home buying and installing it themselves.
If you make computers Lindows isn't $99, it's a single $500 fee for as many computers as you want to put it on. So if you build 50,000 computers that is one penny per computer. Windows is the largest single component cost of a Wintel computer.
Well, at least you're up front about prefering corporate rule to democracy.
I think we should return to the original constitution and have a confederacy of states
You wouldn'thappen to live in the southern United States, by any chance, would you? I got news for you, the South LOST the civil war.
Shockingly enough, I don't see that function enumerated ANYWHERE in the Constitution. I, of course, must be in error. Please, by all means, educate me as to where you found it stated that one of the government's roles is to "protect" us from corporations?
What do you think a corporation IS?! It is an invention of government (the people) that is supposed to benefit us (the people). We, the people, through our government, allow people to organize a business in a certain way TO SERVE THE COMMUNITY INTEREST.
What Republicans/corporatists are missing when they complain about "the government" is that the government is the PEOPLE. And there is red tape, because there has to be ACCOUNTABILITY. The red tape is OVERSIGHT. Corporations don't have accountability internally, they are autocratic and are not easily accountable to the people. SO they have to be REGULATED so they don't get out of control.
The story is ABOUT the Bush settlement, and the 9 states trying to overturn it!
So there's still a chance of the OS and productivity software markets opening up to competition, instead of the Bush "settlement" (read: bribe payoff) which gives government protection to the Microsoft monopoly!
The idea of the antitrust suit was to enable competition. Here's a test of the result of the Bush "settlement" - has there been increased investment in companies competing with Microsoft in the OS and productivity software arenas?
As for your high taxes, I agree; but I don't think it has anything to do with the Cold War. It has more to do with Congress, and their pet projects.
Dude, you're using a computer. How hard do you think it will be for you to look some of this up? There's a place called Google and it's at www.google.com. It takes keywords, like "US budget".
As for Congress and their projects, this is a MINISCULE part of where the tax money goes. It goes primarily to military, interest on the Reagan debt, and programs that benefit individuals like Medicare & food stamps. (Social Security comes from a trust fund that is built up from the FICA tax, so count that separately. It has a HUGE surplus - even though the government is currently using that trust fund to pay for recent tax cuts.) LOOK IT UP.
After the cold war military spending went UP. We now spend more than EVERY OTHER COUNTRY PUT TOGETHER and we're using that money on jet planes to chase people riding horses in the desert.
A flat tax would be the best. No corporate welfare, no deductions for my kids, my mortgage, my stock market losses, etc. Everybody (and I mean everybody) pays the same. We might be surprised at how well that works out.
A flat tax would mean that everyone really rich pays a lot less and everyone else pays a lot more. That's what "flat" means. Are you SURE that's a really good idea? YOUR taxes would way more than double, guaranteed, unless you're one of the top 2% or so.
No deductions huh? Suppose you own a store, you buy $90,000 worth of stuff and sell it for $100,000. You'll have to pay taxes on $100,000 income because there are no deductions for the stuff you bought to resell. And if you say deduct THAT, then we're right back where we started, arguing over WHAT is deductable.
How well do you think THAT will work out?
I don't understand why some apparently left-leaning people think stockholders should be on the hook for corporate expenses and liabilities.
You don't understand why the OWNERS of a company shouldn't be responsible for its DEBTS???
What about when Drexel Burnham borrowed $100 million, gave it out in bonuses to their top execs, then declared bankruptcy 90 days later? That is an extreme example to illustrate the case, and it did happen.
It's well documented that the Reagan SDI was the world's biggest head-fake for the kremlin-- it was meant to accelerate Soviet spending to the point that it would break the regime, and it worked!
It's also documented that Soviet spending on arms did not increase AT ALL after Reagan's election.
It's not hard to look up. Don't just repeat what Rush says.
We have socialism for corporations here.
In the U.S. corporations and their shareholders are not ultimately responsible for their debt. When a company goes bankrupt the shareholders do not have to pay off the creditors. The public has to absorb the debt.
And the public ha to absorb the costs of pollution created by the companies, health costs, etc.
Have you factored in the costs of roads, highway patrols, wrecks, ambulances, and the whole taxpayer-funded infrastructure that props up the federal highway system?
And fuel use, carbon emmissions, other emmissions, oil dropped on the roads and finding its way into streams, rivers, lakes and the ocean, brake dust finding its way into lungs, and insurance?
Time to face reality, even if they had recounted a thousand more times, Bush still would have won. Even the liberal newspapers who did their own recount came to the same conclusion.
This is just FALSE! The newspaper conclusion depended on which way they were counted, and whether the illegal military absentee votes, sent AFTER the eletion, were counted.
There is no question that tens of thousands more Floridians TRIED to vote for Gore, and that Gore got more than 500,000 more votes that Bush nationwide.
This is not offtopic, it's a historical perspective on this subject, from the U.S. viewpoint. Many Slashdot readers are too young to remember Nixon, so here's a reminder of why so many Americans worry about giving government police and spy agencies too much unregulated power.
After Nixon's resignation, the Church Committee, named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, conducted a wide-ranging investigation of US intelligence agencies. In its final report, issued in April 1976, the committee concluded: "Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied."
The committee said the abuses by the intelligence apparatus mirrored the growth of excessive executive power and excessive secrecy, and that in the name of "national security" intelligence officers and their senior officials blatantly disregarded the law and the civil liberties of their targets. (Sound familiar, anyone?)
The Church Committee revealed the enormous scope of the operations against anti-war demonstrators, civil rights activists and left-wing political parties. This included the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro), which had the stated goal "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" left-wing opponents of government policy. FBI headquarters alone developed over 500,000 domestic intelligence files on US citizens.
In addition the committee found:
* At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency."
* Nearly a quarter of a million first class letters were opened and photographed in the US by the CIA between 1953 and 1973, producing a CIA computerized index of nearly 1.5 million names.
* Separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups in the course of the CIA's Operation CHAOS (1967-1973), aimed at crushing the student anti-war movement.
* Millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the US were obtained by the National Security Agency from 1947 to 1975 under a secret arrangement with three US telegraph companies. (Replaced now by Eschalon)
* An estimated 100,000 Americans were the subjects of United States Army intelligence files created between the mid-1960s and 1971.
* Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were created by the Internal Revenue Service between 1969 and 1973 and tax investigations were started on the basis of political rather than tax criteria.
The Senate committee also found that these agencies sent anonymous letters attacking the political beliefs of targets in order to induce their employers to fire them. Similar letters were sent to spouses in an effort to destroy marriages. The committee also documented criminal break-ins, the theft of membership lists and misinformation campaigns aimed at provoking violent attacks against targeted individuals.
One of the most infamous operations uncovered by the Church Committee was the FBI's campaign to "neutralize" civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. This included an extensive surveillance program to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" to use in order to "completely discredit" them. The FBI mailed King a tape recording made from microphones hidden in hotel rooms. As one agent testified, this was an attempt to destroy King's marriage. The tape was accompanied by a note suggesting that the recording would be released to the public unless King committed suicide.
The FBI's Cointelpro operations against the Black Panthers involved the killing of several leaders, including Fred Hampton, by the Chicago police, as well as the frame-up and imprisonment of scores of others.
I gave more than 10% of my gross income to charities that help
people in need.
Dude, I hate to tell you this but Pat Robertson used the money to finance his diamond mines.
You say raising the minimum wage helps the economy because it gives workers more spending money. Okay, fine. But honestly, please, honestly, what do you think the employers are going to do about the prices of products they sell? Maybe raise them to make up for the loss in profit caused by paying more for workers?
Employers hire as many workers as they need to to meet demand.
They don't hire workers because they have extra cash laying arouynd, and they don't fire workers when customers are pounding on the door.
Companies price their goods at a level competitive with their competitors, and according to what customers will pay. Labor, especially at the minuimum wage level, is SUCH a small part of the pricing... (I ran a company for 15 years.)
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Regardless of who's statistics you look at, the truth is irrefutable: Social Security DEPENDS on the concept of todays worker's paying for today's retirees.
Actually you don't seem to know much about it. It is NOT financed by current taxpayers. It is financed by the money we set aside - OUR money pays for our RETIREMENT. Social Security has a multi-trillion dollar surplus built up.
Under Reagan, (after he cut taxes for the rich and there were huge deficits resulting) they pasSed a huge Social Security tax increase (which made the deficits look lower). Since then this surplus has been building up. Since then it is OUR money being set aside for our own retirement. (Which is why it is so bad that Bush is spending that money on tax cuts for the rich.)
If you prefer some unarguable figures, go to www.omb.gov and note that the "largest peacetime economic expansion in history" did not begin under Clinton, or even Bush #1...it began under Reagan! In his second term, not his first! You cannot argue these figures, they are true!
If you stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh and did your own research you would know that there was a big recession in 1991. That eneded the Reagan expansion (which started after the Deficit Reduction Act tax increases in 1984 by the way.)
$125,000 a year isn't even NEAR what we're talking about here. You aren't even getting the tax cuts, dude. You're paying INTO Social Security and that money is being used to GIVE the tax cuts to those WAY above your pay grade..
I understand. Everything GOOD with the economy came from Reagan and now Bush. Everything BAD with the economy came from Clinton.
Got it. Understood. Wakarimashita.
Also, looking over historical charts that show the stock market ALWAYS doing much better under Democrats - that's ALWAYS from the preceeding Republican presidents.
And looking over the historical charts, showing that Democrats ALWAYS lower deficits or balance budgets, that's ALWAYS because of the preceeding Republican presidents - and Republicans ALWAYS increase deficits and debt, that's because of the preceeding Democrats.
Got it.
But couldn't you also say that taxing corporations and rich people more would cause them to hire fewer employees and pay lower salaries to them?
This isn't an abstract argument. This is easy to check. Look at what happens when the minimum wage is raised, or when taxes are raised.
This is what Clinton did in 1993. Look what happened - the best economy ever. AND look back in history to whenever this has been done before - very high economic growth results.
Under Bush taxes have been cut and government services are being cut - and the minimum wage has slipped way down (due to cost of living increases without increasing the minimum.)
Furthure, you could also say that taxing corporations less would give them more money to pay employers or expand business.
OK, this is also easy to check. So is that what HAPPENS? Guess what, it isn't. Corporations have much higher growth when there is MORE regulation. Look it up. Not hard to do.
What the hell did the "community" ever do for people like us?
No matter what you might think of democracy, community, charity, etc. you have to admit that spending public money to control epidemics saves YOUR ass as well as everyone else.
We ARE all in the same boat whether you like it or not.
The first community in the U.S., Jamestown, forced the rich to work because everyone had to eat, everyone needed shelter, and everyone had to pitch in.
If I recall correctly, W's big tax cut reduced the maximum federal income tax rate from 39.6% to 33% or so, which means someone making $50,000 a year will see a small gain, but those that are incredibly wealthly, making $1 Million a year, will see a huge windfall.
Sorry, but ONLY the very very rich get that tax cut. If you're making $50K you aren't in the bracket that got cut.